Word: painterly
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...Painter-Teacher...
England had an internationally renowned theater a century before it had an artist even known by most of his countrymen. During the early 18th century, William Hogarth became Britain's first great painter, winning that distinction with an art charged more with dramatic subject matter than seductive style. He called himself an "author" rather than an artist, and works came out like serial scenes of a play. He illustrated a rake's progress in eight pictures, a harlot's downfall in six. "My picture is my stage," he wrote, and he made it roar with rogues...
...Puritan, Hogarth sought to lay bare the foibles of his England. Yet he was no revolutionary; he wore the scarlet coat of a gentleman, and respected the Crown. He married the daughter of the man who painted murals in St. Paul's, eventually succeeded him as Serjeant-Painter to Kings George II and III. He began life as an apprentice silversmith, wound up with a country house and six servants...
...artists themselves do their bit. Painter Ad Reinhardt, who has so "refined" his paintings that they are currently all the same size and all look absolutely black until sufficient staring reveals an invariable cross of rectangles, is wont to make such statements as: "There is no place in art for life . . . the one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness...
...Esthetics is to art what ornithology is to the birds," quips Barnett Newman. On the contrary, too many modern painters seem to listen first and paint afterward, to be guided by the art theory of others rather than an art instinct of their own. The turnover is so fast that a style is lucky to last more than a couple of years before it is pronounced dead by the critics. With such a declaration, many a collector decides that he had better unload, prices decline, and artists get despondent. More in anger than in jest, Painter Jimmy Ernst ticked...